Poverty and the Occupation

In yesterday’s blog, I discussed the effect of the occupation on Diaspora Jewry. Today I want to consider another side effect of the occupation. Each of these arguments may not be conclusive, but when you add them up they indicate why it is so important to try to arrive at an agreement with the Palestinians.

Dollars, or rather shekels, are fungible. A dollar you spend on one project, you can’t spend on another. It is because of this reason that all assurances Israel gives to America that it will not use the 3 billion dollars of aid to establish new settlements are meaningless. There’s one budget, and if America gives 3 billion dollars to Israel there’s an additional 3 billion dollars to be spent elsewhere, including the settlements.

In the past year 100,000 Israelis joined the ranks of the poor, more than half of them children. The number of children living under the poverty line is 35.2 percent of all Israeli children, 1,630,500 children in all. The number of poor families increased to 20.6 percent of all families. (As an aside, poverty is highest in Jerusalem where 56 percent of the children and 42 percent of all the residents were poor.) All this happened despite the general improvement in the economy.

Defense Minister Peretz, can say again and again the increased demands of the military establishments will not come at the expense of the resources needed to alleviate poverty. His reassurances are not convincing. The military needs big bucks to replace equipment used in the war, to provide better training and preparation for IDF for the next war, for new reinforced tanks and much more. Israel cannot rest until it finds some method of neutralizing the Hezbollah missiles. The next generation will reach Tel-Aviv and Israel cannot allow that. There is no guarantee that in war, chemical and biological warheads will not be used. Which Prime Minister will be able to deny the IDF the funds needed to mount a successful defense? I think it’s safe to say that as long as the Israeli –Palestinian conflict goes on poverty will keep on increasing.

Suppose there was a mutual agreement to the Arab-Israeli conflict along the lines of Taba or the Saudi proposal such that there would be no more wars. Just suppose… what the Germans call a gedanken experiment. Israel would be in a position to significantly reduce its defense budget. It would also be able to shift the funds that are used to build the endless infrastructure of the West Bank to other areas. As a result of these savings, let’s imagine, poverty can be reduced by twenty percent. The price would be Arab sovereignty in East Jerusalem, a contiguous Arab state and the loss of the Golan, etc. My intuition is that the settlers would prefer to hold on to the territories rather than give them up and reduce poverty.

I say the settlers are idealistic, sincere and selfish. They care for no one but themselves. They don’t care about the effect of endless wars on Israeli society. They don’t care about the worldwide growth of anti-Semitism. They care about Chevron and Tapuach.